Metapragmatic Evaluation of Verbal Irony by Speakers of Russian and American English

Ksenia Shilikhina

doi:10.2478/v10015-011-0027-8

Authors

Ksenia Shilikhina Voronezh State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10015-011-0027-8

Abstract

The paper discusses metapragmatic assessment of verbal irony by speakers of Russian and American English. The research combines ideas from metapragmatics, folk linguistics and corpus linguistics. Empirical data are drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Spontaneous evaluation of linguistic behavior is an important function of both explicit and implicit metapragmatic uses of language. Distributional adjectival patterns of the Russian word ирония and English irony are treated as implicit indicators of folk metapragmatic awareness. Connotations of the adjectives reflect our everyday linguistic practices and contribute to the vagueness of the notion and the definition of irony in scholarly theorizing.

Author Biography

Ksenia Shilikhina, Voronezh State University

Ksenia Shilikhina is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Voronezh State University, Russia. Her research interests include semantics and pragmatics with a special focus on verbal irony. Another area of interest is corpus linguistics. She teaches courses in Linguistic Typology, Semiotics, Applied and Computational Linguistics and Formal Models in Linguistics.

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